Businessman targeted by AI writer has a history of criticizing Moroccan officials

Montreal businessman Hicham Jerando wasn’t surprised when his name surfaced in an AI-generated article that tied him to an alleged international drug ring running through Canada, Morocco and Turkey.Mr. Jerando, who immigrated to Canada from Morocco 16 years ago, has become a high-profile critic of the country’s King and its government. He was identified as the head of a global drug smuggling operation in a story purported to be by Canadian journalist Daniel Robson, who turned out to be an AI creation. More than 20 stories under that name appeared in several Canadian news outlets between 2025 and 2026. Some praised King Mohammed VI and others made the case for closer Canadian-Moroccan relations. At least one other story included the same allegations against Mr. Jerando.In an interview, Mr. Jerando said he and his family have been targets of smear campaigns for years, ever since he started openly accusing Moroccan authorities of corruption and human-rights violations. “All these allegations are made by Moroccan secret services, which are just targeting free speech and activists around the world,” he said. AI fabrication suspected of writing dozens of articles in Canadian publicationsMorocco has long been singled out by human-rights groups for suppressing free speech and cracking down on political opponents.“Simply for exercising their rights, Moroccan human-rights defenders are routinely the victims of a combination of unlawful surveillance, smear campaigns, and judicial harassment or criminal prosecution,” Amnesty International said in a report on Morocco released Thursday. The report details how Morocco’s intelligence service, the Direction Générale de la Surveillance du Territoire, or DGST, targets dissenters by using sophisticated surveillance software, such as Pegasus, to hack into phones. “The range of tools they deploy is broad, but the goal is clear: to blackmail, discredit, shame and, if necessary, imprison those who speak out in defence of human rights in Morocco,” the report says. Mr. Jerando, 49, said he and his family have experienced similar harassment. Rabat has repeatedly denied using spyware against its citizens. Mr. Jerando and his wife immigrated to Montreal in 2010 mainly because she required medical treatment that was not available in Morocco. He had no interest in politics at the time and devoted his energies to building a successful men’s wear company while his wife worked as an accountant. When the pandemic hit, he started reading about the hardships many Moroccans were facing. “People were suffering because they didn’t get any help,” he recalled. So he started criticizing the government with a few posts on social media. The blowback from officials was almost instant. “Everybody started attacking me, and the more they attacked me, the more furious I got,” he said.He broadened his criticism to the legal system and started commenting on corruption, youth unemployment and economic mismanagement. His messages began to resonate, and soon he had 800,000 followers on TikTok and about three million viewers on YouTube. The blowback quickly intensified. Last year a Moroccan judge convicted Mr. Jerando in absentia on charges of “inciting terrorism” and sentenced him to 15 years in prison. Moroccan police then arrested his sister, her husband and their two children, one of whom was 14 years old. The younger child was released, but the others were convicted of “forming a terrorist group and using social media to spread threats, false information, and incite violence.” His sister received a two-month suspended sentence and a fine. Her husband was sentenced to two years in jail, and the couple’s 21-year-old son was given three years. Both were also fined. Mr. Jerando said he’s been in touch with the RCMP about his safety. “They met me so many times, and they say to me, ‘Pay attention.’” He’s convinced Moroccan intelligence had a hand in the Daniel Robson scam and believes a man in Montreal created the fictitious journalist. Mr. Robson was only unmasked because of the due diligence of Ilker Sezer, an editor at Türkiye Today, an English-language media outlet in Istanbul.He was sent an article from Mr. Robson last month outlining the claims about Mr. Jerando. When Mr. Sezer tried to verify details about the drug operation, the person purporting to be Mr. Robson had nothing to offer and refused to talk to the editor on the phone. Mr. Sezer approached several Canadian media organizations that had printed Mr. Robson’s stories and raised his concerns with them about the so-called journalist. They have since all taken down his stories.“My sense is at least someone in connection with the Moroccan intelligence was involved,” Mr. Sezer said in an interview this week. No one from the Moroccan embassy in Ottawa or the consulate in Montreal was available for comment. Mr. Jerando has been successfully sued in Quebec by Moroccan officials for defamation. He said he’s been sued six times, and court filings show judgments against him in four cases. In one case he was fined more than $160,000 and sentenced to 30 days in jail for contempt of court. He said he served 14 days before agreeing to take down some of the offending videos. In a ruling in June, 2025, Quebec Superior Court Justice Horia Bundaru described Mr. Jerando’s conduct as “negligent and malicious.” In reference to a defamation case involving Moroccan lawyer Adil Said Lamtiri, Justice Bundaru wrote: “The overwhelming evidence revealed that Jerando had spread and amplified falsehoods about Lamtiri that he had gleaned from a few isolated sources, without conducting any verification himself, without any regard for the consequences of his accusations, and − worse still − with the intent to harm Lamtiri.”Mr. Jerando remains defiant. “I’m ready to die,” he said. “If the end of this is death, okay, do whatever you like. I’m going to talk about the system and not stop at all.”